


Handcuffed

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [34]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amorality, Canon-Typical Violence, Cluster Trigger, Gen, Poor Life Choices, Self-Destructive Behavior, mentions of bullying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25940260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Generally, when your trauma causes the sudden and random occurrance of reality-defying superpowers, you're excited. You get lasers, you become super durable, maybe you can warp space or transform into a stronger form.Sometimes, she wishes she hadn't gotten powers at all. Maybe at least then she'd be better at handling her life with any amount of grace.
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver/Consequences
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [34]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 8
Kudos: 72





	1. Chapter 1

Class stretched on like an unpleasant and unwelcome silence.

Mrs. Richards was not a very vocal teacher or a particularly engaging one. She had never really seemed to like her job, as far as I could tell, though she didn’t seem to hate it either. It had always seemed to me that she didn’t really care; not about the bullying or about whether or not people passed her class. She treated it like mindless labour, like she was sorting boxes on a conveyor instead of being the deciding factor on whether or not someone got into university-level biology.

I didn’t like her, though probably for different reasons than most others. Most people disliked Mrs. Richards because she came down on ‘disruptive chatter’ significantly more than any other teacher at Winslow, and she wasn’t afraid to send people out into the hallway or down to the principal’s if the behaviour kept up. Personally, I didn’t think playing academic chicken with a bunch of possibly-armed gangbangers was a smart idea, but then again most of them didn’t even have her class to begin with, so it probably didn’t matter.

I glanced back down at the sheet of work on my desk, tapped my pencil against the doodle-covered margin. I hadn’t originally chosen biology for any real interest in it, but more because I had remembered Emma wasn’t going to be in it. At Winslow you had a few choices for the sciences you had to take after 9th grade, and the easiest among them was ‘oceans’, a class on marine ecology. It was, as a result, by far the most popular, and had just about everyone I didn’t want to be near taking it.

My stance on the topic of biology hadn’t really changed much, even with the bullying gone. Biology was boring, nothing I was even remotely interested in, and while I liked that the class was quiet, I was finding it somehow more taxing than other classes, where nobody would keep quiet for longer than thirty seconds at a time. Barely three months into the school year and I was already considering dropping it, but therein came the second problem: I didn’t really have much in the way of options. I could drop biology and swap my mathematics class to the block biology currently inhabited and as a result get access to chemistry in what was once my mathematics block, but unfortunately, Mrs. Richards taught chemistry too, and apparently the class was just as hard. The only other option was oceans, which, for what should be obvious reasons, wasn’t one I was about to take.

I turned my head up towards the clock and tried not to frown. Ten minutes left of the class before lunch. It’d felt like longer, more like several hours rather than three-quarters of one, but then most things had come to feel like that recently. Difficult, a chore, like climbing up a hill for the benefit of people I neither cared about nor thought much of. Most of Winslow was corrupt down to its core to begin with, teachers always played favourites, turned a blind eye to avoid the extra work that comes with being an actually decent person. The only teacher in the school who I could confidently say was invested in their job was the gym teacher, and I hated her more than I did Mrs. Richards.

School had always dragged, even before Winslow. I had an awful attention span when I was younger and while it had gotten better as I got older, it had never fully gone away. I’d always wanted to move on to other things, to keep the flow of work going, to do anything to make the time pass by quicker, and the fewer distractions I’d had in any one class, the worse the feeling got. Winslow had been something of an exception to the rule, no one class had ever been quiet enough outside of tests to inspire the same boredom I had felt in middle school, where the average kid wasn’t involved in the gangs. _Had_ being the key word, as Mrs. Richards seemed completely devoted to doing the opposite.

Tracking my eyes back down to my page, I scribbled my name and date in the boxes near the top of the worksheet and let the pencil fall from my fingers shortly thereafter. The doodles probably stood out in my coursework lately, I’d been finding myself relying on my imagination to survive the last handful of minutes in most classes. Not because they had become any easier, if anything my devotion towards studying I’d maintained during 9th grade had vanished now that the bullying and sabotage that inspired it was no longer ever-present in my life, but I just didn’t really have the drive for it anymore. When I used to finish things early, I would pull out study material, try to get anything written down, to use up that moment of safety from Emma and company to keep my grades up.

Nowadays, I found myself asking what the point was. I sometimes wondered if I was depressed, though while I did have that lack of drive described online, I didn’t really feel the way depression was often described. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the energy to keep up what I was doing in the past, it was more that I simply did not give enough of a care to bother anymore. Maybe it was depression, maybe it was something else, I didn’t feel like thinking too much about it would reward me with much more than a splitting headache for my troubles.

I glanced back up at the clock. Six minutes. Still too long, I was running out of page space and at this rate I’d have to start invading the blocks of text about porcine intestinal tracts if I wanted to keep myself occupied. That and pick up my pencil, which had rolled nearly to the front of my desk, perched precariously on the edge.

In another class, in another time, I would’ve snatched the pencil off to stop someone from purposefully bumping it to the floor out of spite. I would’ve killed to be in my place barely months ago, to be anything but the bullied, ostracized freak that everyone got to take their chunk of flesh out of. I wanted so much to be normal, even if Emma wasn’t in my life, I’d just wanted to go to highschool and fade into the background, get in and out and be done with it.

Now? I was starting to have doubts.

Mrs. Richards made a noise low in her throat, her trademark ‘hem-hem’. “Sheets at the front of your desk,” she ordered, her voice almost shrill even when speaking neutrally. She had one of the highest-pitched voices I’d ever had the displeasure of hearing, and that included gummy-mouthed toddlers who mainly conversed in squeals and screams.

Leaning over, I slipped my pencil into my hand and then pushed my sheet up to where it had been before. Turning around, I made eye contact with one of Emma’s less relevant hangers-on, Charley or something like that, before very pointedly letting the pencil drop into the open mouth of my bag. She didn’t quite wince, but her mouth thinned out into a line and she glanced to the side, unwilling - or, hopefully, unable - to match my stare.

Turning back around, I propped my elbow up on my desk and buried my chin in the heel of my palm. Mrs. Richards passed me by, reaching out with glossy, red-coloured nails to pinch my sheet from the table, barely giving it a once-over before piling it over the sheet she’d retrieved from the desk in front of me. The class, despite the promise of lunch, remained quiet and still, though a few people had started shrugging their backpacks on or slipping into their sweaters and jackets in preparation. I, and everyone else, knew better than to test Mrs. Richards on whether or not she would make us remain in the class for the entire lunch out of spite. She’d done it before, after all.

Arriving back at the front of the class with the sheets tucked in one hand, Mrs. Richards turned back, placing them down near the front of her desk. I watched for a moment as she said nothing, just stared over the class like a hawk looking for something to swoop down on and catch in a moment of weakness. Sometimes I really did wonder if she was the way she was because she got something out of it, used her position of authority to feed some kind of sadistic impulse without consequences.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I will be handing these back to you after I’ve graded them,” Mrs. Richards began, and I tuned her out just as quick. I could feel my power respond to the words, a lurch in my head, something I could feel but that wasn’t physical, the connection forming with almost a physical weight, leaving behind a marker. I couldn’t see it, could only really sense it, but I crushed it instantly anyway, ignoring the reluctance of my power to do so. Promises, statements, when made towards me—they _stuck_. People couldn’t go against them, even innocuous ones, unless I either made the ‘marker’ - I’d considered calling them ‘tags’ lately, but I hadn’t really decided yet - inactive, which I could, or removed it wholesale, which I did more often if only to avoid the headache.

In a world of superheroics, some people got lasers, others became incredibly durable, some could generate fire or other elemental effects, others could even change their shape or warp space.

I could make people unable to go against promises and, as if some sort of conciliatory bonus, I could sense how strong someone was in comparison to myself.

Even when it came to powers that defied the laws of physics, I still somehow managed to come up lacking.

The bell rang, a shuddering buzz that almost made the windows shake.

* * *

I arrived at the cafeteria well after it had become cluttered. I wouldn’t’ve risked stepping foot in it before, Emma had always owned the space in a way that some teachers couldn’t even manage with their own classrooms, but since Sophia’s arrest, her rule over the cafeteria had waned considerably. Combined with my new reputation and Emma’s lessened status, I was no longer the target of an endless deluge of disgusted, disinterested, or hateful stares.

No, instead I was the recipient of curious, pitying, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, excited stares.

“Taylor!” Catherine called out. I caught sight of her as she rose from the seat near the back of the cafeteria, still somehow managing to shout over the bubbling murmur of conversation. She was a very dirty blonde, nearly light brown, and conventionally attractive, with all the right shapes in all the right places, for lack of a better descriptor. She wasn’t _beautiful_ , not necessarily, she was still a teenage girl with all the potholes that came with, but she wouldn’t look out of place in Emma’s group.

Really, Catherine’s main redeeming factor outside of her appearance was that she _was_ good-natured. She was dim, vapid and shallow, annoying more often than not with her bizarre fixation on capes from other countries, but she was never truly malicious. I tolerated her for the most part, and she kept in my good graces mostly off of the fact that I was relatively sure there wasn’t a mean enough bone in her body to take advantage of me.

Reaching up to push my glasses back up the nose, one of the arms with its broken hinges not doing anything to help, I kept my face carefully blank. I walked with my head raised and my shoulders loose, I didn’t hunch anymore, and most of that was to pretend I was in control, that I wasn’t self-conscious and had more confidence in myself than I actually did. The reality was, of course, different, but my decision to insulate myself from potential bullying by integrating into a friend group hadn’t been unwarranted. In the aftermath of Sophia’s arrest, everyone had a story to tell about how they’d mistreated me, and for all that it had nearly ruined Emma’s social standing, it had done something more important: reset _my_ social standing. I used the time Emma was suspended to join a peer group now that people didn’t treat me like shit on the heel of their boot, and as far as I can tell, my decision to do so had been smart.

I wasn’t getting bullied anymore, that much was for certain.

Trudging my way over towards Catherine, who levered herself back down into her seat after making sure I was actually walking over, I tried not to compare myself and the things I wore to her. I wasn’t a vain person, I didn’t think, I knew I had some good features, such as my hair, but old habits die hard and I couldn’t help myself sometimes. I felt ratty, scraggly, my wardrobe didn’t feel like it fit me anymore, especially not the baggy sweaters and formless pants that made up the bulk majority of it, but then it was what I had to work with. I’d started wearing colour more, just to feel like I wasn’t the ugly troll to Catherine’s shining presence, but it still didn’t feel like enough most of the time.

Navigating around another table packed with students, I finally got a full view of who I’d be sitting with for the lunch period. Catherine was obviously at the front, grinning madly at the monthly Atlantic Coast Cape Magazine that she’d always brought along with her. Next to her was Joseph, skin a dusky light brown, a blend of Caucasian and African American that also made up a good majority of his features. He’d been the second person who’d fully accepted me into the group, though not without some reluctance; I was pretty sure he had been convinced the bullying was going to start up again and, frankly, I didn’t blame the mixed-race guy from wanting to avoid the spotlight in Winslow.

He nodded at me, I nodded back. Which about summed up our relationship, for what little of it there was.

Next was Patty, a slightly plump girl built like a fridge. Not by genetics, to be fair, Patty was five-three and probably not getting any taller, with wispy blonde hair that wouldn’t look out of place on a model’s head, but she’d apparently decided at one point in her life to get really into lifting and hadn’t bothered to stop. Her parents had supported her all the way, and her peers who hadn’t had quickly figured out that they couldn’t physically match her in any way that would make bullying her an effective tactic.

Patty had been the least reluctant - besides maybe Catherine - to let me join in their group. Apparently she ‘liked how I never stopped getting back up’, and that was about the most positive perspective on being a doormat for other people’s aggressions I’d ever heard. We got along well enough, though Catherine was really the only reason why we spoke. Patty was a lot like me to those ends, she liked her quiet and unneeded conversation wasn’t something she cared much for.

She was my favourite out of the entire group, for what should be obvious reasons.

Finally, there was Amanda. I was a bit surprised she was at the table today, she’d been keeping away from the cafeteria recently because of the new E88 recruitment drive. She was Sri Lankan, or at least her parents had fled from there during a local uprising that had spilled over from India to the island in question. She was darker skinned, darker than anyone at the table, with long, straight black hair and very visibly Indian features. Amanda had been one of the last in the group to accept me, and even now she only barely tolerated me, unlike Joseph, who seemed to at least respect me, and didn’t even bother to glance up at me as I approached the table.

Tugging the chair I normally took - right next to Patty, with a few chairs between me and my next closest neighbour, Catherine - I hauled my backpack off my shoulders, dropped it down near the front of the chair, and slumped down into the welcome embrace of cheap, inflexible plastic.

“Rough day?” Catherine asked without looking up, turning to the next page of her magazine.

I glanced up at the ceiling, slid down the chair until I had to stop myself from slipping down beneath the table. “I had Mrs. Richards,” I said, because that was enough of an explanation in my opinion.

Catherine still didn’t glance up, forever absorbed by the mindless magazine in front of her. “I still don’t have her, weirdly.”

“She’s the teacher who does all the important science classes,” Patty cut in, voice dry. “Of course you don’t know her. You took oceans.”

Catherine finally spared me and everyone else the time of day, tearing her eyes away from the page, her face caught in faux-offence. “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she started, a teasing lilt to her voice. “I still don’t know why you didn’t take the class, everyone knows it's basically a free credit.”

“I hate fish,” Patty supplied flatly. It said something that I believed her.

The inhabitants of the table turned to me, then, and I found myself shrugging on instinct. “I didn’t want to be in the same class as Emma,” I explained, because it was true. I was just not including that I didn’t want to be in a class with Madison or Sophia either, not that the latter went to Winslow anymore.

“Speaking of the ginger bitch,” Patty started, one heavy elbow poking at my side. I glanced over to her and then followed her gaze, catching sight of Emma just as she entered. I felt something sour in my stomach, twist into a painful, angry knot that made me want to scream and shout. There she was, Emma _goddamn_ Barnes, walking into the cafeteria with Madison at her side, chatting amicably with her own group. The group itself had gotten smaller, shrunk significantly as people put distance between themselves and someone who was nearly arrested, and hadn’t even started to recover. I hoped it never would.

I still didn’t think it was enough. Sophia I could assume ended up in juvie, or at least far, far away from Winslow, seeing as she was dragged out in handcuffs and never came back, but Emma? I knew all about it. She and Madison had ended up with two weeks of suspension and after-school detention for the rest of the semester. They’d gotten off with a slap on the wrists, for all the shit I’d finally managed to get people to see, to realize they were doing to me. They finally listened, finally saw the truth, and in the end I’d ended up handcuffed right alongside them and while I hadn’t been punished in the end, it’d still felt like another confirmation that life was out to get me.

I might’ve gotten powers out of that incident, but I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

After all, I was almost certain they had gotten powers too.

God, I hated her. I hated Madison too, if significantly less, but Emma? I wasn’t sure what I ever saw in her. It should’ve been clear when I was a kid exactly the type of person she was. Shallow and vapid, but not like Catherine, whose vapidness was just annoying, Emma was shallow in a way that was hurtful, infectious, turning everyone else into her devoted little minions. I had even been one at a time, looking back at middle school I could see my younger self taking part in bullying just to please her. She was a blight, a creature willing to latch onto any advantage she could find and use it to beat someone to death.

From across the room, Emma met my eyes, her face spilling into a sneer. I lidded mine, smiled back emptily in her direction until she turned away, grabbing hold of Madison and marching off towards the other end of the cafeteria, her gaggle of confused sycophants following quickly behind her.

“Not handling her fall from grace all that well,” Patty commented after another moment, turning away from Emma and her group and returning to her lunch.

It was hard to really quantify just how untouchable Emma and Sophia had been. Winslow was not a good school, it was not a _safe_ school either. If you fell into any of the categories that would get you targeted, you _would_ be targeted inevitably, even if it was only momentary or to make a point. It was a testament to their own invulnerability that Sophia had been so popular, so successful in her track and field duties, without also ending up with both legs broken by the Hitler Youth brigade. Nobody could remain on the top for very long anymore nowadays, one group or another would always find a way to drag them down a peg, and now even Emma and Madison weren’t safe from it.

I hated the fact that I went here as much as I was satisfied watching Emma flinch away from a guy in green and red trying to make a grab at her. It wasn’t okay that this was life in Winslow, that if you fell into the spotlight and were a good enough target you _would_ inevitably be targeted, but I would take what I could get.

“Yeah,” I said instead, reaching down to pull my lunch bag out. Emma always left a sour taste in my mouth, her existence felt chafing. Popping the lid on it and hauling out the wrap I made this morning, I started picking at the saran wrap with my nails. I didn’t like thinking about Emma, I didn’t like talking about her or being near her, everything about her made me angry, upset. She still had that control over me, and I sincerely hated it, but it always came back to her. I’d gotten powers because of her, but turns out that’s not a _good_ thing. You weren’t supposed to feel positive feelings to a person who gave you bad enough trauma to break reality.

Stuffing the first quarter of the wrap into my mouth, I tuned out the mindless - and mostly completely worthless - chatter of the group around me and let my thoughts wander.

* * *

World Issues was the only class I shared with Emma and Madison. It was the only class that none of us had been willing to give up, and it had been the only class they had been unable to reschedule into another block without dropping a required class like math or one of the sciences. They had tried, admittedly, part of the original agreement with the principal had been to keep us as separated as possible until Arcadia could get some spots open and get me a transfer - not that they weren’t taking their good time - but they hadn’t quite managed. In fact, in the bid to get us separated from other classes, they’d ended up with all three of us ending up in World Issues a semester early.

I still wasn’t sure how they managed that.

Mr. Gladly was the tool who ran the class, and he reminded me of someone who peaked in high school. The signs were all there; he was young, vaguely attractive, but hopelessly infatuated with the approval of the ‘popular’ students. I was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to have sex with any of his students, but suffice to say my opinion of him was low enough that, if it did come out he was being a predator, it wouldn’t surprise me.

If there was anything Mr. Gladly was good at - and it wasn’t teaching, he spoke like Mrs. Richards most of the time, rote and monotone and clearly disinterested - it was seeing the winds changing and adapting. I’d watched him fawn over Emma initially, endlessly praising and going out of his way to ensure she was always grouped up with her friends even for the group projects where we didn’t get to choose who we worked with. It hadn’t taken longer than a month for that to change, though, away went his engagement with Emma and Madison and the rest of her peacockish flock and now, unfortunately, he was paying me attention.

I might’ve disliked Mrs. Richards for the complete and total lack of care she held towards the people she was teaching, the sheer monotony she treated an important job with, but I disliked Mr. Gladly more. There was something deeply uncomfortable about a man so self-obsessed with being popular among teenagers half his age that, despite being more interesting to listen to, he still managed to be my least favourite teacher.

I watched him shuffle around near the front of the room while the rest of the class filed into the room, most not happy that lunch was over. I didn’t share this class with anyone from the group I was usually with, though for every other class bar biology, I shared it with at least one of the tolerable ones. Me and Patty had more in common than I’d originally assumed, and I hadn’t noticed she was in a good half of my classes until she’d pointed it out one day. We tried to pair up whenever we could for projects, it was easier if the bullshit and drama of highschool politics were cut out and I could just focus on my work, but I wasn’t always so lucky.

Mr. Gladly had a seating plan that he’d devised sometime after the start of the semester, and had revised after the three of us had been included in the class. As with most things he does, he’d probably intended to help us reconcile by doing what he did, but the reality was anything but.

Emma clattered noisily as she settled down into the seat to my right, Madison passing by her as she slumped down in the seat to my left. We were dead center in the room, and against all odds, against all protocol and information he’d likely been fed about our incident in the principal’s office, he, in his grand, benevolence, had put us side by side, with me in the center.

I ignored the feeling of Emma staring into the side of my head like a hawk, propping my chin up on my hand and staring dead forward. Mr. Gladly smiled in my direction, eyes gleaming like he had done the world a grand favour, and I could almost literally feel my opinion of him drop by another notch, which was impressive considering I’d thought at this point I’d reached the bottom of where my view of him could be.

Even though neither Emma nor Madison were ballsy enough to try bullying me again, it didn’t mean old blood was washed clean. It was clear to literally anyone who saw us, besides maybe Mr. Gladly, that we didn’t like each other. We sneered, we glared, we spoke openly about disliking one another. It wasn’t like we didn’t make it obvious, but part of the agreement, the one she’d been forced to swallow because despite being a gang school Winslow still had a zero-strike policy, was that if any of them tried something, they’d _all_ get into trouble. It had worked well enough, neither Madison nor Emma wanted another suspension, but it meant I couldn’t retaliate either, regardless of how much I wanted to.

The lights in the classroom dimmed and I dragged my eyes up to watch the projector creak to life, splaying a half-fuzzy image across the whiteboard. The classroom settled down, growing quiet, but not silent, as Mr. Gladly continued to ferry materials over to the desk he’d set up next to the projector.

Finally coming to a stop, the manchild smiled. “So! Today we’ll be going over something I know you’ve all been talking about. This might be World Issues, but sometimes those issues can be close to home. Does anyone have any guesses?”

I felt Emma’s hand go up, the brush of air carrying over the sickly-sweet smell of her perfume.

Mr. Gladly paused on her, then worked to scan the rest of the room. I matched his gaze and saw, surprise surprise, that nobody was terribly interested in going along with it. It was just after lunch, nobody wanted to really _do_ anything, and I was pretty sure at least a quarter of the class was high if the growing stench of weed was any indication. Finally, after another few seconds of hopeless searching, he resignedly glanced back towards Emma. “Yes, Emma?”

“The new Wards,” she answered, and her voice grated so harshly this close.

Mr. Gladly smiled a weak smile in her direction. “That’s right, does anyone in the class know their names?”

This time both Madison _and_ Emma’s hands went up, though thankfully a good quarter of the class’s did too.

“Mr. Young!” Mr. Gladly called out, pitching his voice to be playful.

Brendan Young - and she only remembered his name because he got shit for ‘sounding Asian’ and it being an entire thing that had given her a little bit of breathing room during the early incidents surrounding grade 9 - squinted, as though trying to find out if it was a trick or not, before shrugging. “Kindred and Domino.”

Mr. Gladly slotted a piece of plastic onto the projector, the whiteboard filling in with a photo of two girls. I felt myself go still, perfectly and utterly, my fingers tensing tighter and tighter around the pencil I’d hauled out of my bag until it creaked. The girl on the left wore a sleek white bodysuit with orange chain-like decals that swooped from her shoulders down to her gloves and boots. Her mask was little more than a slip of material, meant to resemble two wolf heads twining together. They hadn’t even bothered to get her a wig, her hair was just as ginger as it was now.

The girl beside her wasn’t obviously Madison, no, but it wasn’t hard to tell. ‘Domino’ wore a white-and-black bodysuit, designed to inspire images of more than resemble dominos, with little dots interspersed throughout. Her mask was a domino mask meant to resemble an actual domino, which sat beneath a wig of white hair and a black bowler cap with a scattering of dominos adhered to it. If it wasn’t for the fact that she was smiling in just the right way, so angrily familiar, I almost would’ve thought it was someone else, that the similarities were just a coincidence.

I’d known they’d gotten powers, or at least had a hunch. It matched everything that came up in discussions about ‘multi-triggers’, myriad expressions, _whatever the hell it was_. They’d been on the ground like I had when I came to, and there’d just been this feeling that they had them, that I just _knew_ they were hiding it. It was there, swimming in the background of my mind, a low noise of discontent.

I just hadn’t expected them to be Wards.

A hand tightened around my knee beneath the desk. “Don’t you _dare_ tell anyone else,” Emma hissed, her voice low enough that the background chatter of classroom discussion hid it. “I know you have them too, so keep your fucking _mouth shut_.”

I said nothing, did nothing. I felt completely and utterly empty. I felt my head turn and I stared down at the girl who had been my friend for most of my life. She wasn’t sneering, but her face was hard and jagged like she was a second away from hitting me. Like she would like nothing more than to hurt me more, take more things from me, make me more of a victim and yet still somehow the enemy.

My fist was hitting her nose before I really knew what I was doing.

* * *

“You’ve been distant.”

I stared up at the ceiling of the living room, leaning back so that the old wooden rocking chair would follow my motion, cradle me. My knuckles ached, bright and painful, stinging all the while. I could feel every tug of the bandages they’d wrapped around it, every moment the bag of frozen peas shifted against it. My face hurt just as much, on the two places where Madison had managed to get a few glimpsing blows before we’d been hauled apart by an irate and surprised Mr. Gladly.

I just hoped Emma appreciated the purpled eyes and ruined nose I gave her.

“Not only have you been distant,” Dad continued, unbothered or uncaring about my silence, as he had been since Mom died. “But you’re getting into fights. I know you and Emma aren’t close anymore, and I _know_ I wasn’t there for you when—”

“Do you, though?” I said, unable to keep them down. My relationship with my father had been on the outs for a long, long time, but the apathy had made it worse. I’d never brought up a lot of the harmful things I’d thought about him, the disappointment, the anger towards his negligence. I’d kept a lid on it, but I couldn’t anymore. The words slipped out more easily than I was altogether comfortable with. “Because it sure is convenient the second there’s consequences you’re _now_ realizing that you weren’t there, that you _left me alone_.”

I dropped my eyes from the ceiling to my father, who stood ramrod a few paces away. His hands were fists at his side, they’d dragged him out of work to pick me up and notify him about my week-long suspension for fighting. I’d also be getting detention with Mrs. Richards for the two weeks following that, and it was a lunchtime detention, so there went what social status I had built up.

“ _Taylor_ ,” Dad started, his voice thick with warning.

“ _Danny_ ,” I spat back, letting the anger guide my course.

He threw his arms up, hands open wide in a display of exhaustion. “I can’t do this right now,” he said at last, not sounding particularly sad about the fact. It sounded more like he wanted an excuse to run away. At least that much hadn't changed. “I have to get back to work, but we’re going to talk about the consequences of your actions later. Until then, you’re grounded.”

I ticked my brow up, smiled emptily at him. “Would you look at that, you’re being a father for once.”

I watched him swallow down whatever he was about to say, his throat visibly bobbing. After a long moment, with hands now tight fists at his side, he finally glanced away and marched towards the door, nearly ripping his coat off of the hanger. He threw the door open with all the repressed anger he could reasonably muster, the hinges creaking and the knob slamming against the wall, probably denting it. He was out the door and slamming it hard enough to make the pictures on the wall rattle barely a breath later.

Glancing back up at the ceiling, I let out a sigh. I looked like shit, my face was probably the colour of a wine stain, and my knuckles all hurt something fierce. I had been suspended for school for attacking someone seemingly out of the blue, my father was pissed with me, I was pissed with him, and really pissed with everything. My luck was legendary, it would seem; we all got powers, and they get to be heroes, while I’m stuck with the powerset of a fairy from a goddamn Maggie Holt book.

I was upset, I was hurt, I wanted to do something with my life, I wanted to feel in control of _anything_ again. I wanted and hated the normalcy I’d finally been given. God only knows what this would do for my timeline to go to Arcadia, maybe they might drop the idea altogether and I might be stuck at Winslow being hit on by no-chin ugly neo-nazis and forced to pretend to like the company of a girl who decides her political compass on whether or not the people who support it are sufficiently attractive. Maybe I’d go back to school and be the violent one again, the bullied one again, everything reverting right back to where it was before.

I wanted an out.

I glanced towards the window, out onto the street, the overgrown lawns and roughshod buildings, and I knew that I had one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "oxto's made another cluster snip without much actual action? wow surely breaking new ground there, isn't she?" - some people, probably.


	2. [2]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor meets a few capes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a pretty supremely fucking awful day and decided to vent by writing this. Why? Not sure, but it helped somehow. I guess. Don't expect frequent updates for this one, but I'm considering having this on the back for random updates when I want to dip back into Worm's cape stuff. Supergirl is fun and I intend to write plenty more of it, but I do kinda miss Brockton Bay and all the faces therein.

Growing up in Brockton Bay, my parents had always been careful to tell me where I should and shouldn’t go. It had been a necessity, because while we didn’t live in the worst part of the city, it wasn’t like I lived in a gated community or anything. I lived on the fringes of the bad parts of town and it showed. The street my house was on wasn’t well taken care of, a few of the homes were boarded up and sometimes occupied by squatters, and at least for the years I went to middle school, I had needed to get on a bus that went right through one of the seedier parts of the city.

I liked to think I had a pretty good grasp on at least the eastern half of the city, if not more. I knew the gang tags to look out for, the street names that had been drilled into my head by a then-overprotective Dad who just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t end up like a pal of his, left stripped and beaten on the side of the road. Some of the memories didn’t come so quickly, but I found myself remembering as I read the street names off of the signs as I walked by them; blurry flashes of the time before my mother died, when things had been better.

I glanced down at my purpled knuckles and tried not to frown. The left half of my face ached, I’d seen the damage in the bathroom after Dad had left. My eye was definitely going to be swollen shut by tomorrow, a present from two meaty blows Emma had managed to slam into the side of my face, and my jaw was going to be stiff where Madison had jammed her elbow into it for at least a few days. My knuckles were, however, by far the worst. My right hand was nearly inoperable, with difficulties opening and closing each finger, usually accompanied by a bone-deep stiffness and an unpleasant spike of pain. My left was better, but only because I didn’t hit as hard with it, and even then the wrist around it was mottled purple from where the teacher had grabbed hold and pried me off of Emma.

I really shouldn’t be outside. My father had grounded me, I was suspended from school, I had any number of days to heal and then go out to...

To what?

That really was the question here. I was standing on the edge of Merchant territory, staring into the throng of half-decayed apartment complexes tagged thick with capital M’s. What was I even doing here? I had no goals, no plans, _nothing_. Was I trying to show Emma and Madison up? They were Wards now, _heroes_ , they would probably be loved by the press, like they’d been loved by the teachers. They probably had friends, knew the other Wards, they got to do things, to use their powers productively, while I did nothing.

It wasn’t fair, but then nothing about Emma had _ever_ been fair.

I sunk further into my jacket, reached up to adjust the scarf around the lower half of my face with my left hand. I didn’t really need the scarf; Brockton Bay didn’t get really cold in November, but nobody had looked at me oddly when I was out walking with it around my face. I’d chosen to wear it more because I wanted to hide my identity, I didn’t have the funds or the care to get a costume. I hadn’t even intended to do anything with my powers, just sit on them until... _something_ happened.

I hated that. I hated how I kept _waiting_ for things. Waiting for something to improve, waiting for Emma to come back, waiting for the bullying to stop, for someone to listen to me. I had come out to stop that, but I hadn’t left it behind; I had no goal, no target, it couldn’t even really be called a patrol. I was wasting time standing around like the world would drop an explanation into my lap, fix my problems and give me more purpose than a nebulous ‘get out of high school and the bay’ that I’d been clinging onto since Mom’s death.

Before the incident, I had been able to hide it, to bury the truth in my chest, but not anymore.

I hated this city.

I had lied to myself about it before, besotted with the idea of it being fixed, bringing it back to its glory days for my dad. I couldn’t see the point now, I couldn’t see what in it was even _salvageable_ anymore. I hated the city, I hated how Dad prioritized it over me, how it rewarded him by draining him more and more every day, taking pieces of him each time he came home. I hated the people in the city, I hated how easy people fell prey to the gangs, I hated how I couldn’t escape it even at school or at home. I hated how nothing would change, that my eyes had been opened after that incident, that the only thing Brockton Bay would do is gradually sink into the ocean and _stagnate_ , that nothing would change for the better, only for the worse.

I let my left hand drop to my side and shut my eyes.

I couldn’t keep going like this. Today had made that much clear; I had never been a violent person, even verbally, I had been timid, skittish. I had feared violence, hated the pain that came with it. Fights had always seemed so scary, so quick to happen and so sudden to end. Yet, I had hit Emma in the face without a second’s hesitation, dragged her to the floor and wailed on her as she tried to get free. I’d even hit Madison, gotten her good in the nose, before Mr. Gladly had mustered the balls to haul me off.

Cracking my eyes open, I stared at the unchanged scenery in front of me. Tall apartments, thick with graffiti, left unattended by wealthy landlords who lived miles away, possibly not even in the city at all. The street next to the sidewalk I was on was treacherous with potholes, there were places where people had torn out the storm drains, leaving gaping openings that nobody had bothered to fix. There were a few corner shops, a gas station just where Merchant territory technically began, but even they weren’t immune to urban decay. The 7/11 had half of its sign unlit, the mom and pop store next to it had all of its windows covered in a metal lattice.

Was I afraid? Of what? Not the people in there. Nothing they represented really freaked me out anymore. Was I afraid of the commitment? Possibly. I wasn’t exactly wearing a costume right now, my scarf and glasses didn’t really hide my identity that well. Put me in a lineup and I could probably be easily picked out from it. If I went home now, even if someone asked where I was, I could just say I went for a walk, and that much would be the actual truth.

I had the option to just pretend the entire impulse hadn’t happened. I couldn’t even really feel the jittery nerves that had gotten me to leave the house anymore. It had felt all-consuming at the time, like the walls were going to close in, but now I just felt numb.

Everything could go back to normal if I just let it.

I took a step forward, my boots crunching on gravel as I transitioned from the sidewalk to the rocky parking area that separated the street from the 7/11. I took another, and then another, before finally falling into a stride. One pump of the legs after another, I closed the distance to the 7/11 and then easily passed it, catching sight of the cashier glancing at me from the corner of my eye. I kept going, easing myself down the grassy hill just behind the 7/11 and onto the sidewalk below, where the street snaked through what had once, in Dad’s childhood, been a suburb for the middle class, built sometime in the late sixties to early seventies.

I reached behind my head, pinched the fabric of my hood between my index finger and thumb, and tugged it a few times to get it free from my scarf, dragging it up over my hair and down until the hem rested on my forehead.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was more. My hair was not just my best feature, it was my most distinct one. I knew that I was more plain than ugly, something about Emma’s insults in the past didn’t stick as well as they had, but my hair was different. Keeping it under the hood would also protect it somewhat if everything went wrong.

I had a few ideas, going forward. My power wasn’t the direct sort of power that people talked about. I couldn’t physically intimidate someone with it, but I could dupe someone with it. I just needed them to say the wrong thing in the right way. Someone simply telling me they’d tell me the truth would be enough to turn a drug dealer into a mole, a panicked lie that they won’t tell their boss about me would get their silence about my existence. There was enough there that I could subvert someone into something useful, given the right circumstances.

Glancing around, I considered my paths of approach. If nothing else, with my ratty jacket and slouched posture, I looked every bit the type of person who would buy from a Merchant. It wasn’t like I looked like I didn’t belong, though on second thought, looking more preppy, like a rich schoolgirl looking to see what exactly was up with weed, might be a better angle to go with, but I would just have to work with what I had.

Acting like an addict looking for a hit was out. I knew how addicts acted in the abstract, from consumption of media and going to school with them, but I didn’t know enough about drugs or the people who took them to pass myself off as someone addicted to them.

No, I couldn’t act like I was familiar with drugs, but I could act like the sort of person who _wanted_ them. I’d had similar thoughts before, if maybe Emma was right—maybe I was really just a Merchant-in-waiting, a skinny, drug-addled prostitute waiting for my next hit. Why not just give in to it? Merchant kids at school always looked blissed out of it for the most part, they escaped their problems by never having to deal with them.

I could act like that, like instead of just dismissing the thought outright and reminding myself my father wanted better for me, that I had given into it. That I had gone out looking for it, that I was looking for an _out_. That I was someone who could easily be taken in by the promise of a good high and sweet dreams, a way to fix my life by never really having to fully confront my problems.

I took in my surroundings again. The houses here were all built like the ones you’d see on comedy shows about happy - if somewhat odd - families, the sort of mindless comedy they aired on off-hours. Some were two stories, some only one, but they were all built to fit the narrow style of suburbia from the mid-to-late sixties. They were all nearly identical, some just larger than others, and with time and age they had suffered. Where once they might’ve been inviting spaces for families, now they sat half-decayed, with pockmarked roofs and peeled paint, along with boarded-up windows.

I took a step forward, glancing to the side as I passed by a rust-covered tricycle meant for a toddler. A lot of debris was left sitting in overgrown lawns, the husks of pool floaties thrown over brownish fence posts, toys scattered near porches and left in pieces across driveways. A lot of the driveways were long overdue for a touch-up, spider-webbed with cracks, and a fair few even had half-dismantled cars, wheels removed and left either on their bellies or kept upright by cinder blocks.

The place was the cultural definition of poor and dilapidated. American exceptionalism, left in shambles and abandoned at the roadside.

There weren’t a lot of people around at the moment, just a few peeking out through windows or sitting on their porches. Thankfully none of them seemed really interested in me, but at the same time none of them were exactly inviting me up to talk to them. There was a distance there, self-isolating, and something about it made me nervous and uneasy.

Something was off, and despite not even living in the area, I could almost feel it.

As I walked further and further into the suburbia, heading in the general direction of what I thought was the trainyard, I started to hear it. A clatter here, the sound of metal scraping across something solid but rough, like concrete or stone. I followed out, mostly because I had no other compass for where to go, the noise growing and growing in volume. People dwindled as I grew closer to it, more being inside than out, with eyes peeking from behind blinds. One older man even shook his head at me from behind his window, looking panicked, but I ignored him.

I caught sight of it before I’d gotten close enough that the sound was deafening. It was hard to explain exactly what it was, outside of a glob of darkness, stretched out across half of the road. It almost hung in the air, looking like someone had taken a shadow and blown it up to 3D proportions. It had no real shape, and it was so dark that as I walked around it, I couldn’t tell if it was 3D or just something 2D that was pointing itself at me, like something out of the Doom era of video games.

The pockets I found as I grew closer to the noise were smaller and seemed to be fading. Where the large one I passed by seemed almost solid, sticking to the air, the others seemed to almost half-sink into the shadows between buildings, swallowing up the area around them, sure, but with less distinction between itself and the ambient darkness. There were signs of combat, too, grass uprooted and tossed, long gouges in yards, an out-of-place vending machine shoved onto its side in the middle of the street.

The banging was loud now, droning in my ears in a way that hurt. It was like nails down a chalkboard, and the number of pockets of darkness were so frequent at the very end of the street, where finally civilization simply gave way to conifers and oaks and dirt paths, that there were more dark patches than there weren’t.

From the side of a house, one of the most dilapidated out of the ones I’d seen until now, a golem of trash, mostly metal, emerged. It was easily eight or nine feet tall, made out of a mess of loose metal, aluminum cans, wood, basically anything I’d ever discarded in my life. It walked oddly, without the jointed movement I’d come to expect out of things of roughly bipedal shape, more like it had no bones or joints to compensate for, giving it an odd, almost octopus-like flexibility to each step.

It turned and stared at me, I stared back.

“You,” it—he, I was pretty sure it was a _he_ from the voice—said. His voice was distorted by the metal around its face, coming off slightly tinny, but undoubtedly human. It was probably not a minion then, or at least I hoped not. I had done a lot of research into the so-called ‘Master’ capes of Brockton Bay and there had been nothing about someone who created golems, not even with the Tinkers. “Are you with _them_?”

I had to play it stupid. I remembered my goal, my plan. If this was a cape, and it was covered in trash, then there were only really a couple of people who it could be. Seeing as I was deep into Merchant territory, I had a pretty good idea _who_ it was. “Are you really Mush?” I said, putting a requisite amount of teenage _gush_ into my voice, as if I’d just met someone I had more respect for than the gum on the heel of my boot.

The golem twitched, before seeming to almost relax. “I am, little thing,” he said, the tone changing from stern and ornery to something vaguely lurid. I felt my stomach twist unpleasantly, I did not want him looking at me in that way, but if it meant I could subvert _him_. Well, at least I’d get to the heart of things quickly. “You shouldn’t be here,” he continued, keeping up the smarm. “It’s not safe, got some...” A pause for dramatic effect, I wanted to roll my eyes into the back of my head, but managed to stop myself. “... _Rats_ skulking around.”

“I was, just, uhm,” I was leaning a bit hard into the awkward, needy girl who didn’t know any better bit a bit _too_ hard, but from the way Mush straightened himself up, what I could see of his eyes turning up in a smile, it was working for him at least. “I wanted to, you know, try out some stuff?” I hedged, folding both of my arms behind my back, tilting my head, pushing my chest out in a rough approximation of Emma that I knew worked significantly better on her than it did me. “I’ve been having a rough couple of weeks, you know? I heard from a friend that you guys sell stuff that can help.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blonde head emerge from a pool of shadows behind Mush. She met my eyes, face half-concealed by a purple domino mask, and grinned, before vanishing back into it. I kept my eyes forward on Mush, unwilling to give the game away.

“We can do that,” Mush said easily, straightening up even more, looking like he was close to _preening_. What a fucking creep. “ _I_ can do that, I got some good stock. Stuff good for beginners, and pretty ladies like you.”

Gag. I wondered if he smelled as bad as he looked, and sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have to get within ten feet of the creep.

“But you need to go to my place,” he said after another moment. “It’s not okay for you to be out here, little things like you could get hurt.”

“What about you?” I said, keeping my tone innocent.

Mush paused. “Me?”

“You promise you won’t hurt me?” Come on, you gigantic trash-covered _fucking_ creep.

Mush straightened more somehow, the garbage on his form pulling apart to reveal gaps. Beneath it was flesh, rough and pockmarked, looking almost like an amorphous collection of paper mache more than anything else. It clung to the trash like sticky dough, peeling away as the distance between it and the garbage grew larger, until, finally, the swathe I had been watching snapped back into place.

“‘Course, lady. I won’t hurt you.”

I felt the tag settle into place. Something warm settled into my chest, I felt a smile stretch across my face, I had gotten so used to getting rid of that control, to crushing my tags instantly. I didn’t want the PRT arriving at my door because I’d left one on a classmate who had realized they could no longer talk about me. The fact that it was active, that it was _working_ , it felt better than whatever he had been intending to peddle.

“That’s good!” I chirped, keeping the act up. The blonde alongside a big guy in black leather and a sleek helmet and a duffel bag clutched in one hand were sprinting between houses, apparently doing their best to keep quiet. The blonde looked to stare at me directly, waved her fingers, and then motioned towards herself before she finally vanished entirely behind the side of the house.

Huh. They wanted to meet.

Turning my attention fully back to Mush, I kept my hands folded behind my back, despite the bitter ache of pain that radiated out from them with every brush. I didn’t let it show on my face. “Where should I go?”

Mush glanced around for a moment before pointing, as expected, towards the shittiest house on the lot. “Over there. Doors unlocked, don’t go rummagin’ around, ain’t nothin’ in there anyway. Looking for the cunts who took it right now, actually, you seen ‘em?”

“Nope!” I lied brightly.

Mush just grunted. “Figures. Didn’t take much, I don’t think, but they stole from a Merchant, an’ that’s not acceptable, y’know? Got a reputation to keep.”

I wasn’t sure what the reputation was besides being the doormat for the E88, but I wasn’t about to drop the act now with my disbelief. “Good luck!” I yelled instead, watching as Mush, with a straightened spine as though he’d just come out of a successful job interview, proceeded to lash out with one fleshy tendril, ripping it through one of the larger clumps of darkness the duo had just been in.

With Mush occupied, I made my way towards the shittiest house on the planet. It was, thankfully, on the same side of the street that the duo had fled through. I wasn’t sure how long they’d wait for me - if I wasn’t misreading their intent, anyway - but it probably wasn’t very long, considering the circumstances. I hiked up the gravel driveway, making sure to crunch my boots against it loud enough that Mush wouldn’t bother to check on me, and didn’t even bother to try to go up the porch. Instead, I just navigated around the side, passing between houses, and picked up my pace into a somewhat frantic jog once I knew I was out of sight, clearing my way over to the street behind it.

A hand grabbed mine, yanking hard, and it took everything in me not to scream at the pain.

“Shit!” A girl’s voice blurted, the pressure releasing from my hand as I stumbled, trying not to fall onto my ass as I stumbled back down into the grass just behind the house I had just promised Mush I was going to get into.

Swinging around, I finally got a good view of the two other capes. The first was the girl, looking a bit chagrined with almost an air of disbelief. She was wearing a lot of purple, a full-body catsuit made out of a stretchy material, with a design that came down at the front of her chest to roughly write out ‘TT’. Just behind her was the guy, a good head taller than me, wearing padded black leather gear, from gloves to boots, and a sleek black biker’s helmet.

We both stared at each other for a moment until, finally, the blonde glanced down at my hand, which I, more out of instinct than anything, quickly hid behind my back. “Well, that’s never happened to me before,” she said after a moment, glancing back towards the man in black leather. Finally, after they traded a look she could apparently decipher despite the helmet, she turned back. “Thanks for the save, though we pretty much had it handled.”

“Tattletale,” the man said gruffly. The blonde, in a show of childishness I’d expected out of someone like Madison, actually _pouted_.

“Fine, I’ll be _nice_. I’m Tattletale, as the big lug just said. Speaking of, he’s Grue, and you are...” She paused, tilting her head to one side in a catlike gesture. Her smile, however, was all fox, a broad, cunning thing that made me want to be out of her line of sight. “A cape, without a costume, who is wounded. Why is this working—oh, is that your power? No, you had another one, your emphasis on getting him to promise not to hurt you—”

I twitched, as much as I tried not to.

“—definitely that, then. Two powers? No, three. A grab-bag, oh!”

Goddammit.

“You’re not comfortable with me knowing that, huh,” Tattletale said, smug. “This was supposed to be a small gig, you know? We figured out they were storing some of their revenue around here, decided we could use it better.”

Actually, wait. “I don’t have three powers.”

Tattletale’s grin just broadened. “I know you think that,” she said delightfully, seeming absolutely enamoured with the fact that she knew something I didn’t. “But you do! So, if you let me pitch you an offer, I’ll tell you what it is.”

“Tattletale,” Grue said again, his voice heavy behind his helmet. “Are you sure this is the time or place?”

Blinking, Tattletale glanced around at that. “Your pools of shadow still up?” She asked, after another moment.

Grue just stared wordlessly at her.

“Then we’ve got ten minutes.”

“The last time you made a time estimate, we nearly got killed by a neo-nazi with a shotgun.”

“Unexpected circumstances, pal-of-mine. Let me do this?” There was almost a pleading edge in her voice, something very insistent.

Finally, Grue slumped, stepping back until he could rest his spine against the building behind him. “Fine.”

Tattletale turned back to me, that smug smile crawling across her face. “So?”

If she wasn’t lying, which she could be, I had three powers, and she knew what one of them was. I needed to know, even if only because it could give me away. I didn’t really like the burst of hope, thick in the back of my throat, that the idea invoked. I didn’t need more power, I just duped one of the Merchants with it. I was completely strong on my own.

But I needed this.

“Fine. You have five minutes.”

Tattletale quietly brought her hands together in what, I imagined, might’ve been a sharp clap in any other circumstances. “Right!” She chirped brightly. “So, I know things. Lots of them, it’s my power, alright? So don’t get creeped out.”

It was a bit late for that—

“You already are,” Tattletale interrupted my train of thought, not making the situation any better. “But I get that. Nobody likes other people knowing your secrets, I get that. So, like, for starters, I wanna make this clear. We’re the Undersiders.”

I didn’t even _try_ to hide my blank confusion, and apparently that stung more than me being creeped out by her had, as Tattletale almost visibly deflated.

“You don’t know. Alright, so, that’s _kinda_ intentional,” she muttered, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. “We’re small time, you know? We steal shit. Mostly from other gangs, sometimes from stores, shit that’s easy to pass off to a fence. I don’t _think_ you care much for the PRT right now, not that I’ve had a lot of time to get many contextual clues for it, but I want to recruit you.”

There was a bit of a knot in my throat. I didn’t like this, I didn’t know why I didn’t, but I really did not like being the focus of someone’s interest. “ _Why_.”

Tattletale stared at me for a moment blankly. “You have no idea, do you?”

I threw my hands up, the long-lingering irritation bursting. My twig snapped, I was done. “The fuck can I do with my power?” I hissed back. “I can make people do shit they tell me they’ll do. That’s fucking it! The most mileage I’ve gotten out of this fucking power has been _that_ , and I had to pretend I liked him!”

“Honey, if Accord lived in this city, he’d’ve had someone like Cranial wipe your brain and enslaved you into ensuring nobody could break promises with him,” Tattletale said, not unkindly. It soothed some of the hurt, and I didn’t like to think about how that string of mild horror managed to do it when a whole lot else hadn’t. “You feel trapped, you’re in a situation of your own making but feels out of your control. You’re feeling very wronged by society, and you’re lashing out in a way that, let me make clear, was very stupid. Your hands are busted, kiddo, if Mush hadn’t taken the bait you’d’ve been in his bed.”

I shuddered.

“That or he could’ve followed you home and done that to your _parents_ ,” Tattletale reinforced. “You’re coming at this wrong, cape life is an out, a fantasy for a lot of people, but not like this. You need to prepare, to do the bare minimum, or join the Wards.”

I couldn’t help the twitch.

“...Which is, yeah, not on the table. Clearly.” Tattletale glanced around again, lowering her voice into a hush. “So, let me bribe you. A couple hundred bucks and a session with you and me to think up a cape name, get you an outfit, and all it’ll cost for you is to help us with one itty-bitty robbery. After that? We can figure out where to go from there, if you wanna keep with us or go a different route.”

I felt like I should have more objections to that. I had been raised right, by a mother and a father who had wanted the most for me, even if life played me the wrong cards. They had seen a future where I’d be more than just the product of Brockton Bay, of the corrupt systems that kept so many people so low. I should have more problems with robbing someone, but I tried to find them, really reached for it, and found... _nothing_.

I wondered where my moral compass had gone. I used to be afraid of druggies, I used to panic whenever I’d even remotely imagined myself doing something illegal.

Tattletale extended her hand, fingers wiggling. “Do we got a deal?”

I stared down at my hand, purpled, bruised, scabbed around the knuckles. I remembered hitting Emma, I remembered her in the Wards, I remembered every last thing she got away with. I remembered getting powers, being crushed by them, feeling like the Wards would turn me away in a heartbeat. I remembered being so confused about them, hating myself for not even managing _getting powers_ right, having two, one that didn’t really fit the other.

I remembered feeling like I was waiting for something to happen, anything at all to make life more than what it was.

I looked up, met Tattletale’s eyes, and took her hand. The shake hurt, she didn’t grip hard, but it didn’t matter. I felt like I was making a deal with the devil, pain and all, and honestly?

I liked it.

* * *

It was getting dark by the time I arrived back home, though thankfully as far as I could tell I was home well before Dad should be. The burner phone sat heavy in my pocket, and words heavy in my head. I had a third power, apparently, what Tattletale had called a ‘power glitch field’. Powers stopped working or worked incorrectly around me, to my benefit, apparently. It was why she’d gripped my hand, her power had told her that the wound was only superficial despite how it looked. She surmised it was because it was part of my power protecting me, I was pretty sure it was just fucking with me.

She had promised to call within a few days - “ _Once you regain use of your hands, anyway, because you’re going to be in so much pain tomorrow_ ” - and I was looking forward to it. Still, she had cautioned against trying “dumb shit like this” again until I could at least grip something without being subjected to, quote “the result of my own folly”, end-quote.

She was a really dramatic person, I’d come to realize.

Stumbling out from the brush next to the side of my house - I’d gone through a backyard getting home, it was quicker from the direction I’d been coming from - I froze.

Dad’s car sat in the driveway.

Reaching shakily into my pocket, I retrieved the burner. Four o’clock on the dot. Dad shouldn’t be home. Shit. Shit, shit.

Putting it back into my pocket, I scrambled the rest of the way towards the porch, dodged the shitty stair, and reached for the door. I twisted, pushed, and found that the door wasn’t locked, despite my doing so. Alright, so, probably worst case scenario. I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the entryway.

“Taylor,” Dad’s voice was firm, hard. He’d only spoken to me like that a few times before. My heart dropped into my stomach.

Shutting the door behind me and locking it, I stripped off my jacket, hung it up on the coat hanger, and then shucked my boots next to Dad’s pair of work shoes. I eased my breathing, tried to steady my heart, and walked from the entrance and fully into the living room.

Dad was sitting in his chair - a plush recliner Mom had bought for him a few years before she died - with his head cupped in one hand, his other tightly gripping the arm of the chair. “Sit,” he commanded, his tone brooking no argument.

Without anything else to do, I did.

“I arrived at work after leaving,” he began, breathing steadily. An attempt to control his anger, I remembered. “I explained why I needed to leave for a while, and was told that I should be back home handling you by a coworker. He promised to cover my shift, and unlike my own daughter, actually seems to be doing my job. I arrive home to an empty house, with you gone.”

I swallowed thickly, opening my mouth to reply.

He raised his hand, stopping me. “Then, no less than fifteen minutes later, I get someone knocking at my door. I thought it was you, but it turned out to be the PRT.”

Panic surged up into my throat, I felt my fingers tightening down on my knees. I wanted to run, I felt like I might even need to.

“Supposedly,” he continued. “Your altercation, among other evidence, pointed towards you being—what did they say? Part of a ‘multi-trigger’, though they were wonderfully vague on the topic. So vague that I needed to use the computer, yours, actually, because mine is still out for repairs.”

I took in a shuddering breath. I wasn’t in control anymore, I had left, I hadn’t covered my bases.

“There’s a lot of browser history that you have to explain, but even then, I stonewalled him. Told him, no sir, that’s not my daughter. You have the wrong person.” Finally, Dad looked up, stared at me. His eyes were wide, concerned, even despite the anger he cared, but he was _so_ , so worried. “Was I wrong?”

“You—you have to promise me you won’t tell them about my powers,” I blurted before I could stop myself.

Dad nodded, mouth opening before I could interrupt. “I promise I won’t tell anyone about the powers, honey.”

The tag clicked into place.

I didn’t get rid of it.

I couldn’t.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He said, finally, sounding exhausted, _pained_. “I had to look it up, you know? There are groups for people who are dealing with ‘trigger trauma’. You went through an incident bad enough to be called the worst day of your life. You could’ve told me, I could’ve gotten you _help_.”

I swallowed. “You don’t understand. They have them too.”

Dad’s brows furrowed. “Who?”

“Emma and Madison,” I said heatedly, angrily. “They’re _Wards_ , I can’t fucking—I can’t even be a cape right!”

“They have powers, like—” His voice cut off. _Like you_ , the unspoken words. His eyes widened, flicked towards me in a panic.

I felt my face crease into something guilty, a wrench in my chest making me want to gag. “I’m sorry,” I burbled, not quite able to keep the tears away from my eyes. “I can’t let you tell anyone. I _can’t_. You made the promise, I won’t remove it. I have to be sure. I’m sorry.”

I was on my feet before I could finish thinking, socks slipping on the floor. I heard my dad call for me, yell my name, I ignored it, sprinting up the stairs.

“Taylor!” He yelled again. He didn’t sound upset or angry, just so concerned. Worried. Caring, like a father.

I hurtled into my room, slammed the door shut, and scrambled forward again. I ripped my desk chair up from the floor, shoved it beneath the knob, just to feel safer. I couldn’t hear him ascending the stairs, I couldn’t hear him at all anymore, but I could feel that connection between him and me. It wasn’t enough to locate him, I had originally wanted to see if I could use that power that way, but it was enough that I _knew_.

I stumbled back, my rear landing on my bed, and shoved my head into my hands, which throbbed angrily at the abuse. Everything hurt, my chest, my hands, my face, I felt like a hundred thousand problems. My father was downstairs, unable to talk about my powers. I had duped Mush, I had agreed to a meeting with Tattletale to rob a place. I was going against every moral I’d ever claimed to have.

I stared at the floor between the gaps in my fingers.

My eyes weren’t wet anymore.

The worst part was, I didn’t even feel bad about going against them.


End file.
